Google’s Top 15: Part 1

This is part 1 in a series of Google’s hardest questions that have been asked of potential employees. It’s taken from the Business Insider (BI).

The Question: How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

The Answer: BI Reader Matt Beuchamp came up with a dandy answer, writing:

I figure a standard school bus is about 8ft wide by 6ft high by 20 feet long – this is just a guess based on the thousands of hours I have been trapped behind school buses while traffic in all directions is stopped. That means 960 cubic feet and since there are 1728 cubic inches in a cubit foot, that means about 1.6 million cubic inches.

I calculate the volume of a golf ball to be about 2.5 cubic inches (4/3 * pi * .85) as .85 inches is the radius of a golf ball.

Divide that 2.5 cubic inches into 1.6 million and you come up with 660,000 golf balls. However, since there are seats and crap in there taking up space and also since the spherical shape of a golf ball means there will be considerable empty space between them when stacked, I’ll round down to 500,000 golf balls.

Which sounds ludicrous. I would have spitballed no more than 100k. But I stand by my math.

So what would your answer have been? Well have a think about it and start prepping for that next interview!Read more: from BI here and here.